 Hi there, I'm Sandy Almak, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to be coloring some mittens in the snow for a special video hop. I'm part of a special hop about saving the crafty YouTubers and I will talk more about that during the blah blah blah section of this video later on. But first let's start with the tutorial and I will apologize for the beginning of this video. It's a little bit in and out of focus because I didn't click a certain button but I didn't want to start over by the time I realized what I had done. But I'm using some Catherine Puller ink and some Catherine Puller stamps to create a background for my card. I wanted the sentiment to be in the middle but I wasn't sure what color I wanted the sentiment to be. So I just laid the stamp on the particular spot that I wanted it so I could reserve that space and stamp all of my mittens around it. And I'm stamping in a gray ink because I wanted to be able to make it kind of no-line coloring. And part of the reason that I wanted to do this video not because everybody's gonna be drawing mittens in the snow on their cards but sometimes it's helpful to be able to put snow under an object. And that's what I thought this might help you to do. And of course if you want the mittens there will be a link in the doobly doo down below so you can go and get the mittens and make this card if you wish. Now some people would look at the blues that I have chosen the B45 that I started with in this B41 and think she's crazy that's too much color. But I want you to note how it's going to change when I start putting the mitten color in there. Everything we see is because of the contrast that we see against it. So when we see white we only see it because there's other colors around it. So there are shadows in the snow. Sometimes they're gray shadows. I'm using blue ones because it's just happier for a card rather than using more of a blue-gray kind of color. And I'm even adding some BG70. That's a BG. That means it's got a little bit of a blue-green in it. And I'll also add a BV. And you can add a bunch of different colors to snow and it will still look like snow if you do it right, if you work on the texture. So I have my shadows that are colored in there sharply and I'm using my lighter colors to create the texture. And even with this BV31 you can kind of see how I'm tapping along to make an actual texture to this so it looks kind of like the crunchy snow. But if you get too crazy with it like I did then just go over it with your zero marker and that's going to soften everything out. I only did a portion of it because I wanted to get to coloring the mittens and make sure all this was going to work before I started finishing all the rest of the background. So I will get to that part. But I'm using one of my favorite combinations for reds, for Christmas-y reds. And I shouldn't say fully favorite because all of the light reds like the R05, the R08, R24, R14, R17, lots of those will work really well with the R89 for the darks and the R37 for the mid-tones. To make the mittens in a kind of a texture to make them look like they're fuzzy, I'm basically tapping instead of doing some flicking to blend. Normally we would use those areas that I'm putting the dark color in and flick towards the center and then blend that into the mid-tone color. But I'm doing that with sort of stippled marks on it instead of doing the nice blending. Now you could do the nice blending and make them look very smooth and glassy, but I wanted to make them look like they were fuzzy like you really wanted to pick them up. So I'm doing the same thing now with the R37. That's the mid-tone color. I'm fully coloring in right over top of where the R89 was and then extending that. So it's the same idea as blending with flicks, but we're blending with stippling instead. So I'm carrying the stippling further in right where I would take the flicking of the mid-tone color and creating that. So you can see that these are starting to look like fuzzy texture on the mittens already. And so I'll go around the second mitten, doop-de-doop all the way around, and then I'm just going to go over the whole thing real quickly with the light color. And you can use any of the light reds. You don't have to use R08. You can use one of the other ones. And that's going to soften out that texture a little bit so it kind of comes together. And then for the string that ties the two mittens together, I'm putting my shadow down first. And this is a good time to talk about why I did the shadows under the mittens first. If you go over reds with your light blues, and especially when I'm trying to soften colors out, like here I made my shadows underneath of the little curly queue lines, not exactly right under them in all areas, because then it looks like the string lifts up and then lays down on the ground. So it kind of comes and goes. But had I gone over that red with the blue, I would have pulled the red into the blue. Red is just one of those colors that's really strong and powerful. So it wants to do crazy things. So that's why I did the snow background for the most part first. I'm also showing you here that you could even go crazier. I went with a B97 and even added some superdarks right around it. And you can see how that adds even more realism when you start adding that real contrast. And that's in snow. I used B97 in some snow. And it's just one of those things that I have gotten very used to is being able to add really strong contrast. And sometimes you don't see how much contrast you need until you have your image underway. Because if you had just looked at the shadows underneath all of those mittens in the first place, you probably would have thought I was insane making my snow that dark. So now we're on super speed. Wish I could actually color this fast. That would be nice. But while I am doing this speed coloring, because this is all the same stuff that I already did in that one section, I thought I'd talk about the video hop. It's a save the crafty YouTuber video hop. The rules and stuff, you don't need to know all the details, but the rules of the way YouTube promotes videos and stuff changed recently. And you had to be a YouTuber of a certain size in order to get promoted in certain ways. So they kind of cut out the little guys. It's just not fair. So there are a bunch of small YouTubers who wanted to get together and they asked a few of us bigger YouTubers to join in the fun so that you guys would know about it. Because if they only did it among themselves, you would not hear about it. So I joined in to help promote the little YouTubers. I'm going to attempt to do something for you because there are, in the several days of this video hop, there are like a hundred different channels, hundred different videos to watch, and you don't have that kind of time. I know that because you have to be busy making things. I don't want you spending like two days solid watching videos. That's a little much. So what I'm going to do is at least for the videos that are in the hop for today, which is all advanced techniques. And if I get a chance, I'll do the rest of them, but a hundred is a lot. But I could probably do the 25 or 30 or whatever it is for today. I'm going to put thumbnails of each one on my blog. So you can go and look at the thumbnails and decide if you want to watch it. And if I can, if I can figure it all out, then I might even put the times down for them so you can know how much of your time you'll be spending and a link to it directly. There's also going to be a link directly in the description of this video so that you can go to the next one. And then that one will have a description, a link in her description to the next one. So you can just hop along. You don't have to actually go to my blog to do this. But I thought it might be helpful for some who like want to get something done instead of just being doing all the watching of the videos. So there you go. I am now adding designs to each one of my little mittens. So there's in the stamp set, there's like stars and snowflakes and Christmas trees and things. And I'm stamping the right on top of the Copic marker. Yes, you can emboss on top of it. And I'm not going to heat set it until I do the whole sheet together. So I'm being careful not to touch the areas that I already have some stamping and embossing powder on just using some nice Hero Arts powder. Heat them all up. And then I'm going to be able to do a little finishing work on the card itself to make my snow sparkle, which is to add some stippling in a white pen. So little by little, this all came together, got my little sentiment stamped in there. And I'll add a couple layers of paper to it to finish it off that you'll see in a second. But I also wanted to mention something that I am going to try to start to do. And you'll notice that it doesn't happen in all my videos coming up because I have some already in the queue. But I am no longer going to be showing you the stamp sets that I'm using. I will describe them as best I can. However, what we're finding is that a lot of the people who are counterfeiting stamps and selling knockoff stamp sets are stealing them even out of YouTube videos. I thought it was safe to at least put it in a YouTube video where you you couldn't like take a good picture of it. But that's why the knockoffs are really badly done because they're taking snapshots off of something they shouldn't. So don't buy knockoffs. That's just a little word to the wise. And this stamp set or any one of them that you see out there don't ever buy from those crazy Chinese websites. They are they're going to kill the craft industry if we keep buying from them. And I know there are some people that just really want to score a deal, but I encourage you not to do that. So there's my soapbox for today. Alright, final reminder, you can go see lots of other videos on the hop. And you can check out what little previews I can get together on my blog. But notice that there are a ton of prizes out there. So you may want to spend some time and go see all of that. I'm going to give you a link to Justine's blog. She's managing all of it and she has all of the links on her blog post, etc. But I'm giving away $325 gift certificates to art-classes.com. So leave lots of comments on this video as well as all the other videos in the hop. And good luck. I hope you win something. And I'll see you guys later. Bye bye.